I haven't observed any pollen being brought in yet but it's not uncommon to see them bring in something during warm winter days.
Wandering Man, what will you do with the queenless colony? Combine? or can you get local queens this early?
Bakers, for now we are just watching. The queenless colony had two fully formed queen cells 11 days ago. At least I thought they were queen cells. Maybe it was just burr comb. Anyway, the cells were gone when we checked yesterday.
I also discovered some capped brood that we hadn't seen before.
I don't know if we just missed the queen, or if one of the queen cells has hatched and is waiting to mature enough to go out and find someone to mate with. One of the healthy hives has drone brood in it, so if there is a virgin queen hanging around, there is hope she'll find some mates.
The capped brood couldn't be from the new queen (if there is one). I must have just missed it before.
At any rate, it is pretty obvious that the bees were able to hide things from me, so I think our best bet for now is to just watch. If the hive gets noticeably smaller, or I start seeing eggs laid on the sides of the comb, we'll combine the hive with another one. That would drop us to 4 hives, and we'd need to either collect two more swarms before May 1, or buy 2 more packages.
My County Appraisal District guy said that as long as I have the bees on order he'll let me claim the Ag Valuation.